Next from #LibrePlanet 2018, learn about "Free software in academia" from a variety of points of view, with a panel of Morgan Lemmer-Webber @mlemweb, Tom Callaway @spotrh, Stephen Jacobs and D. Joe Anderson: https://u.fsf.org/2j3

@slpSounds like you're derailing. Actually people can multitask and just because people are working on trying to deal with the issues of hacker culture, doesn't mean they don't also care about whatever the 'smartphone battle' is. And ya also dealing with community problems is a lot more accessible of a battle than fighting Google. I do both, deal with the community and fight Google. Don't say that one of the things I do distracts me from the other that is what's derailing.

@webmind@z428@megfault@slp The thing is, FLOSS has great gui. Right now I'm using Tusky. What FLOSS lacks in the battle with proprietary is promotion. Proprietary secrecy and gatekeeping gives them a power imbalance which allows for rent extraction, which can then be reinvested in promotion activities, and so the ball keeps rolling. FLOSS mostly doesn't have that option available.

I've made it halfway through my crazy two weeks... Today was a Bernstein Centenary Day 'Total Embrace' at my uni (I was the organiser/instigator) and it involved 6 sessions run by me, colleagues, and my MA students- ranging from an academic panel, to a community choir, to a showcase of a recent musical theater performance. Super fun that Dame Patricia Routlege came and participated in the WHOLE day. She is lovely.

I volunteer with a group called Virtually Connecting that organizes virtual conversations with people at conferences, to link them with people who can’t attend. We have a bunch of conferences in April, including one more session for Creative Commons Global Summit Sunday April 15 3:45pm eastern time (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). See here for that event and see website for other events coming up! https://virtuallyconnecting.org/blog/2018/04/07/vconnecting-at-ccsummit-in-toronto/

At work we have the same hardware for each of the developers (corporate-mandated Windows laptops). We develop in GNU/Linux VMs. We received them when we were purchased back in April by a larger company.

There's a full compiler stack I wrote for the development of certain systems. It uses Saxon and is therefore really heavy on resources (and syscalls). Lots of inefficiencies. (Don't write your next compiler stack in XSLT. I wouldn't have if I knew it was going to become what it is today.)

I noticed that newer devs' systems, with identical configurations, were taking more than twice the amount of time to compile the same software using this stack. A coworker and myself spent a bit of time debugging and it was eventually found to be the microcode. Once my coworker updated his Intel microcode and BIOS to include the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations, the virtualization performance was terrible---over 100% performance degredation in this case (~5m for a normal build without mitigations, ~12m after mitigations). That's far worse than any benchmarks I've read. Disabling the microcode mitigations restored performance to previous levels.